BBC to Communicate with DELEC

Göllheim, August 2004: The BBC has contracted to purchase a DELEC intercom system from UK distributor Aspen Media for its refurbished and extended Broadcasting House headquarters and broadcast centre in London’s West End. Following a comprehensive procurement process that took close to a year to complete, the contract was awarded to Aspen Media and DELEC in the first quarter of 2004.

The system to be installed for the first phase of the Broadcasting House redevelopment, which will provide the home of the BBC’s national Radio & Music operation, is configured with a central hub that interconnects the studios, master control rooms and the many external lines that connect to other BBC sites and various »Outside Sources«. The hub comprises a redundant pair of 20482 Centrix central routers that connect via fibre-opticws to Oratis frames in local apparatus rooms. Here local ports connect to DELEC subscriber panels and handsets, a traditional feature of communications within Broadcasting House.

The local frames also handle a number of functions not normally required of a broadcast comms system, which could otherwise have required further systems to accomplish. For example, to give optimum space utilisation within Broadcasting House, some studio areas will have two studios to each control room. The DELEC system will manage the communications between the studios and their control room, switching monitoring and talkback paths when the focus moves from one studio to the other.
Chris Collings, Managing Director of Aspen Media, was confident that the unique facilities and scalability provided by the DELEC system would make it a prime contender for this key role within the Broadcasting House development. »The comms system is pivotal to the successful working of any broadcast centre; hence the choice of system for Broadcasting House required a rigorous and detailed analysis of the capabilities and value of the systems on offer. We were delighted, to say the least, when DELEC, a newcomer to the UK comms market, was chosen from amongst the well established and respected brands.«

»The second phase of the BBC’s development 'Collings explained' will accommodate World Service and most of BBC News in 2008/9, and the contract framework gives the BBC the option to extend the system throughout the site. The 20482 Centrix central routers for the second phase would be interlinked with those provided in the first phase to form what would likely be the largest comms system in Europe, if not the world.«